Once you've captured something, you have to process it appropriately and put it where you can actually use it. In other words, the organizing stage.
People differ on what they think "work sense" — that instinct for how to get things done — actually consists of. For me, it comes down to whether you organize quickly and accurately. People who are bad at their jobs can't tell, no matter what you say to them, whether a piece of information is something they need or something to throw away, or how exactly they'd need it. Since they can't make that distinction, everything can feel important. They can end up overwhelmed just trying to digest the content.
In the arts and athletics, organizing ability probably isn't all that necessary. But knowledge workers are different. In the early years at a job, handling the tasks you're assigned is enough to stay out of trouble, but the more senior you get, the more contexts and information come at you. If you're self-employed or running a business, there's even more to keep track of. The higher you climb into management, the more a weak grasp of organizing trips you up. Nobody wants to be the boss or the CEO who can't follow what's being said and can't make a decision. In that sense, organizing is an enormously important skill.
Organizing looks like a matter of innate sense. Really, that's just because people never think to develop it. But organizing is a skill you can get good at. Let me go through a few principles of organizing. These principles are fundamental enough to apply to everything from cleaning your room to managing information to software architecture. Much of this draws on Daniel J. Levitin's The Organized Mind.
Not organizing is better than organizing wrong
When your mom cleans your room, the room gets spotless — and you can't find anything. By her standards, she tidied everything neatly by category. You, on the other hand, had kept the things you use often within reach. The books you read most and the tools you use would have been on your desk. This "gap in organizing criteria" is what makes things impossible to find. In just this way, bad organizing is worse than none at all. If she'd left it alone, things would have arranged themselves naturally.
Rather than inventing new organizing criteria for no reason, it's better to use the criteria that already exist. Which is to say: don't add categories lightly. Put another way, when you're not sure whether to split, don't split. Applied to managing information or materials, this means don't create a folder without a specific reason. When you first start using a note app, you make folders for this topic and that topic. And along the way you end up with folders that have no notes in them, or only a couple. Eventually you stop using it. All you've gained is a cluttered pile of folders.
For the developers in the audience, the principle of not splitting lightly applies to software architecture too. Rather than separating services without knowing what you're doing, you separate when you have a clear criterion. Introducing microservices badly just multiplies the interfaces you have to account for between services, which drives up the cost of both design and maintenance. There must be plenty of companies that rushed into microservices during the COVID era through résumé-driven development. And plenty of people who suffered through cleaning up the traffic jam afterward. (The Real Motive Behind the Word "Growth" — The Ability to Run a Project)
So "don't add categories lightly" is a principle worth using for any kind of classification. Excessive, misguided organizing is poison. Classify only when there's a specific purpose or a real need. There's no need to get clever and split things prematurely.
If you can't use it, don't keep it
Marie Kondo is a famous Japanese tidying consultant, known for "if it doesn't spark joy, throw it out." What matters is holding on only to what you can exert some influence over. That goes for life, not just productivity. You can hear all you want that the Earth will be destroyed a hundred years from now — there's nothing you can do about it. That was an extreme example, but a lot of information is just like this "the world is ending" rumor. There's nothing you can do. That, I think, is why Nassim Taleb says not to watch the news. It's noise. (This isn't a call to be completely indifferent to current affairs.)
"If you can't use it, don't keep it" is a principle everyone already knows, so let me turn to a slightly different angle.
This is a prejudice on my part, and a mistaken one, but among the people at work who talk politics a lot or have a remarkable store of trivia, I've never seen one who was good at their job. (There are obviously counterexamples.) The sum of a person's capacity is roughly the same to begin with. Invest in one thing and you lose out somewhere else. You're already busy enough just taking in the information that's useful to you; focusing on politics you can't change or useless trivia costs you exactly that much. I'm not saying politics has nothing to do with your life. It's closely connected. But whether you can take action on it is another question. Only the scale is different — it's the same as the end-of-the-world example a moment ago.
You have to figure out fast how the information you've collected is useful to you. And if it isn't, throw it out immediately. If a source only brings in things you don't need, throw out the source. That's why you delete all the pointless communities and social media. With studying too, you should invest in what you can actually use — you shouldn't be digging into this and that out of FOMO. Focus on acquiring information you're going to use.
If you're thinking, "I can't give up taking in useless information. It's too much fun," then make it useful. I'd love to see the people making political statements at work at least do some party work. If your views on politics are clear and your interest is high, shouldn't you obviously be exerting influence on the world?
From the standpoint of getting things done, organizing by 'action' is what matters
Getting things done means executing. And for execution, information, materials, and tasks have to be organized by action. In that respect GTD and PARA are useful tools, and they pair well with each other. The mindset GTD teaches as central is asking "what's the next action?", and PARA classifies information by action. GTD and PARA offer serviceable criteria for classifying "tasks" and "information" by action.
I work at what is probably the most hectic mobility company in Korea. As a developer. My team recently merged with another, so I'm extremely busy. I work in several languages and have to cover frontend, backend, and infrastructure all at once. There are a lot of services to keep an eye on and the situation changes constantly. On top of that I'm writing a book, running a newsletter, and giving talks — it's enough to drive you crazy. Lately I've had a lot of doctor's appointments too. (This is why I haven't been posting videos on YouTube.)
In a situation like this, with all kinds of work and information pouring in like mad, what proves its worth is how a given task or piece of information is useful to me. The instant something comes in, the judgment has to come out immediately: is this connected to a project (Project), is it related to a service I'm responsible for (Area), is it information to keep in mind (Resource), and if it's a task, how do I break it down and what's the next action? A real productivity methodology proves itself when you're busy to the limit. I'm not emphasizing GTD and PARA as empty words I don't stand behind.